The Revolution That Failed

The Revolution That Failed is a deeply researched monograph but an uneasy marriage of two forms: a detailed local study of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, and a broad argument about the meaning and historiography of Reconstruction. The result is a book that, while valuable, is uneven for several reasons. Natchitoches Parish was unusual, even in the unusual state of Louisiana, as a French settlement in a part of the state dominated by Anglo-American settlers. The gens de couleur (Louisiana's francophonic mixed-race population) were mostly French-speaking through Reconstruction, which set them apart from the enslaved African Americans, who were primarily Anglophone. As Adam Fairclough points out repeatedly, the parish had a drastically lower body count during Reconstruction than did most locations along the Red River. The Republican party remained relatively strong even after it had been crushed in nearby locations. All these facts are interesting, and Fairclough teases out the significance of some of them quite well, but it does seem a stretch to make large claims about the process and significance of Reconstruction across the South, as he does in the first and last chapters, based on the experiences of such an atypical location

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